University of Groningen

The Cognitive and Hermeneutic Dynamics of Complex Film NarrativesWillemsen, Steven Petrus Martinus

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5. Outlook

Throughout the past studies, this dissertation has sought to demonstrate how films achieve

effects of complexity by means of a story or storytelling that challenges viewers’ embodied-

cognitive faculties, demands increased cognitive efforts, and obstructs, prolongs or intensifies

viewers’ formation and application of interpretive hypotheses. However, over the course of

these studies, this dissertation has also touched on a number of aspects of cinematic narrative

complexity that could not be developed fully, yet seem to call for further exploration. As a

result, rather than repeating here the findings from these earlier studies, I would like to take

this final chapter to highlight some unexplored, promising or alternative perspectives on

cinematic narrative complexity that have not yet been comprehensively addressed by either

this dissertation, or – to my knowledge – other work on the topic. The aim of this chapter is

not to thoroughly discuss or address these remaining aspects, but rather, to point out how and

why they appear as interesting directions for further study and, in the process, to offer some

hypotheses or hunches that might help to guide such future inquiries.

So what about…

5.1 The attractions of complex films?

Although this study has sought to address in what ways complex film narratives engage their

viewers, it must also be acknowledged that the question of what sort of viewing pleasure or

appreciation viewers derive from these experiences still resists systematic and univocal

explanation. Naturally, the attraction to complex narratives will vary strongly from viewer to

viewer. Moreover, different films seek to offer different viewing pleasures: as we have seen,

some of the popular puzzle films restrict their complexity to moderate and motivated forms,

encouraging and ultimately rewarding viewers’ intensified narrativization efforts with an

attainable solution or comprehension (Willemsen and Kiss 2017: 5); other films, like the ones

that we have called impossible puzzle films, offer a more excessive complexity that frustrates

viewers’ narrativizing efforts more strongly, and are thus likely to offer different viewing

pleasures.1 Cognitive film scholars generally assume that the enjoyment of popular narrative

films lies, to use Nitzan Ben Shaul’s words, in

the challenging of the viewers’ cognitive faculties in a manner that satisfyingly lets

them construct out of the movies’ compelling audiovisual flow a coherent story that

leads to closure, along with the attendant arousal, regulation, and control of tension,

mostly through suspense strategies (Ben Shaul 2012: 25).

It is reasonable to assume that the more complex and confusing a film’s narrative is, the less

its enjoyment will correspond to the qualities usually associated with conventionally realist

1 For a variety of explorative hypotheses about what might make ‘impossible’ narrative puzzles engaging, see

Kiss and Willemsen 2017, Chapter 6 (pp. 183-207). Many of the reflections on the attractions of complex films

presented in this section of the Outlook are extensions of ideas developed in this chapter.

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and canonical ‘classical narratives’ (e.g., immersion, identification, empathy, the arousal of

emotions, the satisfaction of closure, and so on). It seems clear then that complexity can also

entail a distinct appeal of its own. However, comprehensively addressing the question of the

aesthetic attraction to complex stories demands more extensive research, not least because the

issue allows for a multiplicity of explanatory paths: there are anthropological and

psychophysical constants that can be considered, examining for instance how complex stories

may stimulate our perceptual and cognitive faculties in ways that prove engaging. But we can

also seek to understand the popularity of these films as a result of their self-conscious play

with cinematic and narrative conventions, examining their specific appeal to a generation of

viewers who may seek novel or more challenging narrative forms, or who have gotten used to

the more (inter-)active participation of new media, for instance. The success of complex

stories could also lie in their expressive potential - i.e. their capacity to express, capture, or

make us reflect on the everyday complexities of our present-day lives, world, experiences, or

technologies. And perhaps complex narratives also import some of the self-reflexive functions

of modernist and postmodern experimentations into mainstream fiction. Or it may be that the

enjoyment of complex fictions is part of a more general anthropological appreciation of

complex form per se, comparable to the ways in which we may enjoy the overwhelming

effects of, say, the polyphonic and dynamic surges of a romantic symphony, or the intricate

play of lines and colours in a Kandinsky painting.

In sum, determining the various reasons why audiences are drawn to such films will

require closer research – most likely of a more empirical and qualitative nature, as such

approaches could serve to survey and test (diverse) viewers’ experiences and responses to

various (degrees of) complex narratives. Nonetheless, from this study, some ideas regarding

the appeal of complex narrative experiences can be surmised, and I will briefly offer some

here as tentative hypotheses that could provide indications for further elaboration.

Firstly, with regards to the cognitive and hermeneutic dynamics described in this study, a key

gratifying effect could lie in the distinct hermeneutic play that many complex stories afford.

By hermeneutic play, I refer to the intensified meaning making activities that many complex

narratives evoke in their viewers – i.e., the repeated seeking, trying out, and switching

between different interpretive frames and hypotheses. Particularly the films that we identified

as most pervasively narratively complex (such as impossible puzzle films, or modernist art

films) are often characterised by an interpretive multi-stability: they afford multiple

interpretive options, and tempt viewers to form and weigh various options. This gives rise to a

prolonged and intensified interpretive quest that may be appreciated by spectators for a

variety of reasons.

For one, this intensified interpretive process may be inherently creative and enjoyable,

as spectators synthesise knowledge from their experiential background into new interpretive

hypotheses, and try to match these hypotheses to the narrative at hand. The process can also

have a reflective effect, as the active recombination and deliberation of our knowledge and

perspectives, in dialogue with the artwork, can be revealing about ourselves, our stances, or

our relations to the world. Such a view was proposed by Czech literary theorist Jan

Mukařovský (1979) in his 1936 essay on the ‘aesthetic function.’ Mukařovský argued that the

value of artworks resides in that they offer us opportunities to reflect on the value systems and

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reference frames that we bring to them. A work’s complexity and contradictions, he notes,

enhance this function, for if we consider

the inner composition of the artistic artefact, it is certainly not difficult to conclude

that works having great internal contradictions offer – depending on the degree of

divergence and the diversity in significance which results – a much less convenient

basis for the mechanical application of an entire system of values with practical

validity than do works without internal differences or with only weak differences.

Here too, therefore, multiplicity, variety, and complexity of the material artifact are

potential aesthetic assets. Independent aesthetic value of an artistic artifact resides,

therefore, to all intents and purposes, in the tension, the overcoming of which is the

task of the viewer. (Mukařovský 1979: 93)

As Mukařovský himself also notes, this notion represents a view of aesthetic value that is

‘entirely different from that harmoniousness which is often suggested as the highest form of

perfection and the highest perfection of form in art’ (ibid.).

Yet the appeal of interpretive multi-stability can also be explained in other ways:

alternatively, some viewers may appreciate such effects for a liberating quality. Complex

stories may be seen as a welcome alternative to the closed, teleological cause-and-effect logic

that characterises canonical narratives. Nitzan Ben Shaul (2012) has argued that much of

classical narrative cinema is about closing down cognitive options in order to provide a sense

of teleological necessity and closure to a narrative’s progression. According to Ben Shaul,

classical narration hereby tends to be conducive to a ‘close-mindedness’ in viewers that works

counter to the possibility of what he calls optional thinking – the possibility or capability of

entertaining, imagining, or weighing different paths or outcomes (whether in narrative or in

real life). Part of the appeal of complex films seems to be that they encourage us to try out

various interpretive options during the viewing experience. The quality of open-endedness in

interpretation is generally also something appreciated in our cultural apprehension of

artworks. After all, artworks that cannot be contained or exhausted in a single reading are

generally held in high esteem (in many forms of art criticism, or in the canons) where such

interpretive multi-stability is often considered an artistic asset that bespeaks of a work’s depth

or permanence. A sense of novelty may also be a source of appreciation. Complex narratives

may be thrilling simply because they are different from the canonical narratives and story

patterns that make up much of our fiction and culture. After all, classical film narration has

remained a rather stable and unchanged mode of presentation over time; the vast majority of

narrative films relies on familiar stylistic and narrative principles, which in turn imply a

particular teleological, epistemological and objective logic. Complex narratives that break

with this familiar logic may be appreciated for that very reason. Moreover, a film’s

incompliance to being contained rationally may also be valued for a certain subversive

potential, for instance undermining culturally dominant Western Enlightenment values such

as objectivity, logic, purposefulness, predictability and reason, while emancipating alternative

qualities such as subjectivity, contingency, irregularity, mutability, uncertainty and ambiguity.

Other viewers may simply enjoy the sensation of perplexity that such stories evoke, finding

pleasure in the dazed states of not-understanding, in being overwhelmed by a story, or in

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feeling the affective, non-conceptual sensations afforded by a narrative that eludes cerebral

comprehension.2

Related to the above is another kind of aesthetic enjoyment that viewers may find in

such interpretive multi-stability and hermeneutic play, namely that they deem it to be

mimetically expressive. Spectators may feel that a story’s lack of a singular logic, or the

experience of switching between different possible interpretations, has the capacity to capture

or express something about the world or our lived experience of it. We may read a story’s

confusing effects as an expression of, for instance, the human search for order in a chaotic,

unstable or ambiguous world; or of the complexities of the human mind; as capturing the

fragmented or decentralised state of a postmodern culture, or the ‘condition humaine.’ Such

interpretive moves (re-)connect the abstract experimentations of narrative form with the realm

of human lived experience, and thus work to find a certain meaningfulness in the experience.

This mimetic quality also points to another way of thinking about the possible

gratifications of engaging with cinematic complexity. Due to their capacity to give narrative

shape to experiences of complexity and interpretive multi-stability, complex narratives may

also offer viewers cognitive playgrounds on which to exercise the engagement with

complexity and ambiguities in real life. Complexity has arguably become an increasingly

pervasive quality of the human lifeworld, and many of today’s (inter-)cultural, economic, or

moral issues (e.g., climate change, global trade, cultural migration) are characterised by

increasing degrees of complexity. Such issues ask for new sensitivities beyond familiar linear-

causal thinking, centralisation, singular perspectives, homogeneous categorisation, and

predictable order. Complex films may have a potential to motivate viewers to playfully

engage with complexity, allowing for aesthetic experiences in which puzzlement and not-

understanding may be considered enjoyable or stimulating rather than threatening or

frustrating (as high amounts of complexity in real world situations might be). The question

then is whether engaging with formal-structural complexity in artworks can also impact

abilities involved in coping with complexity in real life – i.e., whether engaging with the one

can have transfer effects on the other. It could be that complex film narratives help to exercise

our minds in processing and ordering complex flows of information, or in juggling multiple,

simultaneously reasonable perspectives. They could also enhance the skill that Reuven Tsur

(borrowing the words of John Keats) called negative capability: the competence of ‘being in

uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ (Tsur

1975: 776). This is opposite to what Tsur calls the ‘quest for certitude’, an urge to settle on a

singular, unambiguous interpretation. Hermeneutic play with interpretively multi-stable films

(that do not allow immediate interpretive closure, and may even reward prolonged perspective

taking) may train viewers in such negative capability, altering the shortcuts in their meaning

making routines to suppress the urge to reach for immediate cognitive closure. And lastly,

given that narratives are one of the main cognitive and cultural tools that we have to give

shape to our experiences and the world around us, it may also be that complex narrative forms

allow more complex forms of conceptualising ourselves and our relations to the actual world

2 This experience may also touch of what some theorists have described under the (rather heterogeneously

employed) header of ‘the sublime’, as excessive complexity arguably has a potential to make the spectator

experience a degree of (over-)stimulation that ‘would in all likelihood be disturbing, or even terrifying in

nonaesthetic contexts’ (Berlyne 1971: 94).

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around us, where, as noted, qualities such as non-linearity, contingency, dissensus, and

contradiction are increasingly a part of grappling with socio-cultural and economic

challenges.

In short, investigating potential transfer effects between coping with complexity in

fiction on the one hand, and the increasing complexity of the contemporary human lifeworld

on the other, could offer a particularly interesting path for follow-up research, and calls for

interdisciplinary co-operation with the social sciences. Likewise, research could also be

directed at individual’s viewers’ varying enjoyment of complex fiction in relation to

individual differences in psychological traits or across cultures, on the basis of known scales

such as the need for cognitive closure (see Webster and Kruglanski 1994) or the tolerance for

uncertainty (e.g., Buhr and Dugas 2002; Berenbaum, Bredemeier and Thompson 2008) and

ambiguity (e.g., Furnham and Ribchester 1995). While writing this chapter, preliminary

attempts at such a collaborative approach are in development.3

Furthermore, whether or not complex narratives have positive transfer effects that impact real-

world coping with complexity, their pleasures may also lie in that they simply allow viewers

to exercise skills they already possess. Liesbeth Korthals Altes (2014: 131) has suggested that

complexity in narrative art may be related to a certain ‘Funktionslust.’ Like actual puzzles,

puzzle films can encourage viewers to use and apply analytic and interpretive competences

simply for their own sake. As Korthals Altes notes, such enjoyment seems to be the result of

the pleasure and interest our minds seem to take in complexity itself, admittedly in

different degrees. This pleasure seems akin to what the German psychologist Karl

Bühler called Funktionslust. This eloquent term refers to the pleasure taken in

exercising a mental or bodily function (Bühler 1965: 157). Such function-oriented

pleasure can be observed in repetitive movements in animal and child play but also in

adult behaviour, from a good physical workout to riddles or crosswords that engage

the pleasure of puzzling and pattern-seeking minds. (Korthals Altes 2014: 23)

As Korthals Altes also notes, ‘the pleasure we may take in our skillfulness in understanding

intricate form may also appear like the Funktionslust of puzzling and pattern-seeking minds’

(2014: 131). The idea that emerges here is akin to a more general Kantian view of aesthetic

enjoyment, which assumes that part of the gratification of art lies in that it affords a free play

of our cognitive-perceptual and imaginative abilities in the absence of direct purposefulness.

The idea of ‘disinterested’, ‘detached’ or ‘distanced’ engagement recurs in many accounts of

3 One of these attempts has resulted in a research proposal for a project built around a collaboration of film

scholars (Miklós Kiss and myself from the University of Groningen) and media psychologists experienced in

qualitative empirical approaches to the arts (Frank Hakemulder of Utrecht University; Elly Konijn of the Vrije

Universiteit Amsterdam, and Katalin Bálint of Tilburg University). This project aims for a comprehensive

theoretical and empirical validation of the notion of complex narratives as cognitive playgrounds in relation to

dealing with real world complexity. Besides a theoretical substantiation, it aims to include a series of studies

examining, among others, the potential transfer effects of exposure to cinematic narrative complexity on

viewers’ tolerance towards ambiguity and uncertainty – abilities that we identify as instrumental to coping with

complexity in general.

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aesthetic experience,4 and is also popular among cognitive theorists of art. David Bordwell for

example writes:

In our culture, aesthetic activity deploys such [everyday cognitive] skills for

nonpractical ends. In experiencing art, instead of focusing on the pragmatic results of

perception, we turn our attention to the very process itself. What is nonconscious in

everyday mental life becomes consciously attended to. Our schemata get shaped,

stretched, and transgressed; a delay in hypothesis-confirmation can be prolonged for

its own sake. And like all psychological activities, aesthetic activity has long-range

effects. Art may reinforce, or modify, or even assault our normal perceptual-cognitive

repertoire. (Bordwell 1985: 32)

Considered in this light, complexity in narrative can be understood as an intensification of this

play of our perceptual, cognitive, and interpretive abilities, afforded by aesthetic forms that

demand heightened (perceptual, cognitive, or interpretive) efforts from the spectator. This is

achieved by the balance that such narratives usually strike between what D.E. Berlyne

described as the dual aesthetic function of ‘arousing’ and ‘arousal moderating’ factors5 – or,

more simply, between elements of ‘disorientation’ and ‘orientation’ (Berlyne 1971: 129-30):

‘the first factor’, Berlyne notes, ‘provides grist for the processes of perceptual and intellectual

analysis, gives them something to work on, challenges them. The other factor gives them

some prospect of success; it provides a basis for efforts at organization and interrelation’

(ibid. 129).

Complex narration may in this sense allow for a twofold pleasure: the enjoyment of

being engaged in the story’s referential and mimetic content on the one hand (the characters,

actions, emotions experiences, storyworlds, and so on), and the cognitive, perceptual and

interpretive engagement with the work’s form and construction on the other. This twofold

perspective is also akin to what philosopher Richard Wollheim (1980), building on Ludwig

Wittgenstein’s work on pictorial representation, called ‘seeing in’: the perceptual recognition

of a representation that involves a simultaneous attending to the thing represented (what is

‘in’ the picture) and the actual representing physical object (the picture itself as a physical

medium, arranged in a certain way). In some cases, the aesthetic enjoyment of complex

narratives might relate to an appreciation of the play of pure ‘form’ – an attraction pertaining

to the work as a composed whole. But most often, the appreciation of complex narratives

seems driven by both forms of apprehension simultaneously, or even their interplay: after all,

our aesthetic appreciation for the work arguably tends to be heightened when we recognise

how complexity of narrative form gives expression to particular mimetic content. Moreover,

some complex narratives also work by providing an overt clash between both apprehensions:

they provide ‘inhabitable’ and immersive storyworlds that are also clearly logically

conflicting, paradoxical, or impossible. Such stories offer what we have called a narrative

double perspectivation (Kiss and Willemsen 2017: 89), allowing the narrative experience to

be accessible and immersive, while simultaneously proving overtly impossible or self-

4 See Collinson 1992, pp. 157-66.

5 Berlyne argued that ‘arousal’ in aesthetic experiences ‘can be raised by such properties of stimulus patterns as

novelty, surprisingness, complexity, ambiguity, and puzzlingness’ (1971: 69).

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contradictory. Such storyworlds can provide a distinct Escher-like pleasure of encountering

seemingly logical yet obviously impossible worlds – an experience described by Umberto Eco

as ‘the pleasure of our logical and perceptual defeat’ (Eco 1990: 77).

Lastly, there may also be so-called eudaimonic motivations to viewers’ engagement with

complex narratives and hermeneutic play. The concept was introduced by media

psychologists in an attempt to resolve the apparent paradox of people’s attraction to art and

entertainment that induces in them negative emotional states, such as sadness or fear. As

noted in the introduction to this dissertation, the enjoyment of complex films poses a

somewhat similar paradox. After all, if confusion is something we generally prefer to avoid in

everyday life, then why would we seek it in fiction?

In an attempt to resolve the ‘sadness paradox,’ media psychologists Mary Beth Oliver

and Arthur A. Raney argued that ‘people consume media entertainment in the pursuit of

pleasure and amusement (hedonic motivations) and as a part of their general need to search

for and ponder life’s meaning, truths, and purposes – motivations that we characterise as

“eudaimonic”’ (Oliver and Raney 2011: 985). Eudaimonic pleasures thus concern a broader

sense of ‘wellbeing’ beyond the more direct gratification of hedonic pleasures and thrills. The

hermeneutic play afforded by complex narratives may tap into such eudaimonic concerns,

through its mimetic and (self-)reflective potential. The dichotomy between hedonic and

eudaimonic motivations, however, still implies a distinction between ‘fun’ and ‘meaningful’

that may be difficult to maintain under closer scrutiny; after all, the gratification of

eudaimonic concerns need not exclude hedonic pleasure, and vice versa (some complex films

are good examples of their possible co-operation). Other media psychologists have sought to

do away with the distinction by proposing different solutions. Research by Ron Tamborini

and colleagues (Tamborini et al. 2010) has for instance suggested that it may be more fruitful

to think about eudaimonic motivations in terms of the fulfilment of people’s intrinsic needs, a

notion borrowed from Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan’s influential ‘self-determination

theory’ (1985). The model assumes three basic psychological needs: ‘Autonomy, a sense of

volition or willingness when doing a task (…); competence, a need for challenge and feelings

of effectance (…); and relatedness, a need to feel connected with others’ (Tamborini et al.

2010: 761). Tamborini’s study empirically confirmed the satisfaction of all three needs in the

playing of videogames. But as the researchers proposed, the general idea of enjoyment as the

satisfaction of needs is probably not limited to videogames only, and is likely to apply to other

forms of media consumption as well (Tamborini et al. 2010: 771).

The attractions of complex film narratives too could be considered in light of viewers’

intrinsic needs. The viewing experience they offer may foster in viewers a sense of autonomy

(by leaving more interpretive freedom and authority to them) and can, for some, work to

enhance relatedness, for instance through the social rewards of the (online) sharing of

interpretations and explanations, or the collective decoding of narrative mysteries. But most

of all, complex films seem to play on the need for competence. The engagement with complex

puzzles often serves to provide viewers feelings of effectance, testing, training, and

sometimes rewarding viewers’ interpretive and analytic skills, sharpness, and media literacy.

As Jason Mittell has noted, even though viewers of complex audio-visual narratives may

‘relish in the pleasures of being manipulated’, they ultimately also ‘want to be competent

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enough to follow [the films’] narrative strategies’ (Mittell 2006: 38). In this sense, the

increase of complex stories in the current audio-visual landscape may be seen as the result of

shifting degrees of competence: it could be that excessively complex popular films like

impossible puzzle films serve as a new way of challenging the competences of a new

generation of viewers used to high degrees of mediacy and complexity - both in art and in real

life.

5.2 Narrative complexity and contemporary audio-visual culture?

Much of the above discussion may appear as if it is seeking to explain the attractiveness of

complex narratives from a somewhat ‘a-historical’ perspective - as the result specific

interpretive and cognitive dynamic that these narratives afford (even though I have tried to

argue that this dynamic is fundamentally historically shaped and situated). Some readers

might as a result still be left with the question of why now? Why is it that complex storytelling

has again come to the fore in exactly this day and age, and is now more prominent or

commonplace in audio-visual culture than ever before?

In this dissertation, I have not tried to answer this question directly, due to a number of

reasons. The most important one is that the matter invites a broad variety of possible

hypotheses and perspectives. Scrutinising and explaining the popularity of these films can be

done various angles that will offer different (and possibly all valid) answers. The difficulty

then lies in determining which explanatory perspective to privilege over others. After all, does

the root of these film’s popularity lie somewhere in the current state of our culture and our

particular media landscape? Is it related to our technology, the digital age, or the new

experiences we have in a mediatised world? Or to people’s increasing media literacy,

competences, or habitualisation to complex narratives? Or are these films the indirect product

of experiences and ideologies that we are exposed to as postmodern subjects? Or the desires

and fears we repress as a society? Or the consequence of more practical shifts in film

production, marketing or target audiences? Interesting as many of the possible perspectives

may be, it is hard to make a case for one as being of more significant or influential than

others, and comparing all possible hypotheses in a single study would be close to impossible.

As a result, I leave it to other film scholars to explore these various angles in depth, and to

make a case for their possible impact on complex cinema as a popular cultural phenomenon.

Broadly speaking, however, in terms of our current media-landscape, some contextual

background conditions can be identified that seem to have a connection to the resurgence of

narrative complexity from the mid-1990s onwards. These involve some observable

technological and economical factors, as well as shifts with regards to present day viewership

(see also Kiss & Willemsen 2017: 10-18). Notable technological shifts, for instance, include the

rise of audio-visual carriers that offered easy access to time-shifting interfaces (e.g., DVD’s,

digital media players) which allowed viewers to engage in close and controlled (re-)watching

(rather than being bound to the fixed temporal flow of cinematic viewing or television

broadcasting). Popular complex films also seem to have emerged striking parallel to the

growing cultural impact of the internet – a correlation that invites a wide variety of possible

explanations. Some would argue that complex narratives have tapped into a new realm of

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experiences that digital media have exposed us to, in terms of non-linearity, interactivity, or a

‘database logic’ (Simons 2008). But also significant seem to be the ways in which the internet

provided viewers with platforms for a more participatory engagement with complex

narratives. Online message boards, communities and forums provided a playground for the

collective decoding and discussing of enigmatic fiction, allowing viewers to share and

compare their and others’ interpretations and responses. Internet and digital media even

allowed for a new kind of paratextual augmentation of complex narrative experiences, such as

with Donnie Darko, where viewers could further explore clues to the film’s enigmatic

storyworld on its website, which offered an equally enigmatic and fragmented digital

labyrinth. As such, the internet seems to have formed a driving force behind the ‘forensic

fandom’ (Mittell 2006) that complex films inspire.

In close connection to such technological shifts, complex narratives also seem to have catered

to certain economical demands. One of the benefits of heightened complexity in narratives

was that it could heighten the ‘rewatchability’ value of a film. Complex films encourage

repeated viewings, as their viewers may want to return to the experience to get a better grip on

the story, discover new clues, or find out how they were tricked. This can result in more

sustained income beyond the box office, as DVD and Blu-ray sales and (online) rentals may

outweigh complex films’ theatrical revenues. Moreover, around the turn of the century,

complex and twist narratives also offered the industry a welcome means to market the new

home viewing carrier of the DVD. From the perspective of producers and filmmakers,

narrative complexity offered an alternative, more economical mode of creating cinematic

spectacle. The novelty of experiments in narration proved an effective way of making smart

or striking films without having to compete with the costly visual spectacles of the

blockbuster. As Matthew Campora (2014) also notes, narrative complexity became one of the

tools by which a new generation of American filmmakers could carve out their position next

to big budget mainstream films, producing what Jeffrey Sconce (2002) has labelled ‘smart

cinema’. Sconce coined the term to refer to the work of (predominantly young) American

filmmakers of the late 1990s, whose films were generally

placed by marketers, critics and audiences in symbolic opposition to the imaginary

mass-cult monster of mainstream, commercial, Hollywood cinema (…). Not quite 'art'

films in the sober Bergmanesque art-house tradition, nor 'Hollywood ' films in the

sense of 1200-screen saturation bombing campaigns, nor 'independent' films according

to the DIY outsider credo, 'smart' films nevertheless share an aura of 'intelligence' that

distinguishes them (and their audiences) from the perceived 'dross' (and 'rabble') of the

mainstream multiplex (Sconce 2002: 351).

Especially for younger directors on a tighter budget, an intriguingly complex or cleverly

constructed story proved a successful method of distinguishing oneself in the commercial

media landscape; looking back, it is interesting to observe that many directors of early

complex puzzle hits of the 1990s and early 2000s (such as Christopher Nolan, David Fincher,

Darren Aronofsky, M. Night Shyamalan, Spike Jonze, Paul Thomas Anderson, or Denis

Villeneuve) have gone on to become notable and established names in (American) cinema in

the 21st century.

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Lastly, both these technological and economical conditions are related to shifts in reception

that bespeak of a new kind of viewership. Technological means like digital time-shifting

devices and online platforms and communities seem to have contributed to upgrading the

traditional ‘passive’ role of the viewer (as a spectator submitted to the fixed flow and

conventions of the cinematic screening) towards more (inter-)active potential. Complex films

may have played on, or contributed to, audiences increased tendency towards more active and

participatory modes of film viewing. In other words, as Miklós Kiss and I noted elsewhere:

The recent trend of puzzle films seems to support arguments that highlight a transition

from the naive and informed passivity (Carroll 1982) that characterised traditional film

viewing, to more empowered positions (Elsaesser 2011: 260) of interactive, actively

devoted, pensive (Bellour 1987 [1984]) and possessive (Mulvey 2006: 161–80), even

forensic (Mittell 2009) viewership. Laura Mulvey astutely sketches this shift as a

transformation of a voyeuristic spectator (Mulvey 1975) to a curiosity-driven viewer,

whose needs to decipher ‘respond to the human mind’s long-standing interest and

pleasure in solving puzzles and riddles’ (Mulvey 2006: 191) (Kiss and Willemsen

2017: 16)

Thomas Elsaesser has argued that contemporary complex films play on these shifts by

offering viewers a new kind of fictional contract – one that is no longer based on

‘identification, voyeuristic perspectivism and “spectatorship”’ (Elsaesser 2009: 37), but rather

sets out to elaborate and test known textual forms, narrative tropes and story motifs to provide

‘brain-candy’ to the viewer (ibid.: 38). These shifts appear even more clearly in television,

where the broad shift from predominantly accessible forms of fiction towards more complex

and sometimes confusing narrative forms did not only contribute to a popular and critical

acclaim of serial (‘quality’) television, but also significantly changed the viewership

associated with it. As Jason Mittell (2006, 2015) has demonstrated, in television too, shifts in

technology, industry adaptations, and narrative experiments seem to have amounted to

changes in viewership. While producers and television networks were discovering the new

marketplace of on-demand viewing, as well as the option to capitalise on transmedial

storytelling and multiple platform engagement (through accompanying websites or games for

instance), viewers turned to binge-watching (watching episodes back to back, or even

ploughing through entire seasons of serial fiction in a matter of days) and discovered message

boards, blogs, and online communities to share their interpretations and puzzle-solving

activities (such as with the active collective engagement with the mysteries posed by the tv-

show Lost). Television writers found out that narrative mysteries and complexity encouraged

such intensified participation, and that such narrative forms could bind viewers more strongly

to their ongoing narrative; at the same time, online fan platforms provided writers the

opportunity to monitor viewers’ responses to the ongoing story, which could help them to plot

their next bold narrative move.

In light of these changes, one could also hypothesise that narrative complexity might work as

an invitational tool to upgrade the traditionally ‘passive’ engagement with ‘offline’ media like

film and television to keep up with the new standards and possibilities of (inter)activity

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promoted by new media. Some film scholars have even likened the workings of puzzle films

to those of video games. As Elliot Panek for instance writes:

An element of non-filmic interactive storytelling exists in these [puzzle] films.

Younger audiences that are increasingly comfortable with the burgeoning interactive

medium of video games may find puzzle narratives appealing for this reason. It is not

enough say that these characters are mentally unstable and that when the narration

diverges from the classical mode, it is merely reflecting their fractured look on life.

We seem to seek the nature of the instability even when we realize we are watching a

psychological puzzle film, and take pleasure in trying to figure out the rules of the

narration that presents the story to us. (Panek 2006: 87)

Warren Buckland (2014c: 185–97) has argued how the narrative design of contemporary

puzzle films is influenced by new media and a certain game logic. Like video games, puzzle

films promise a set of ‘reliable rules’ (Gottschalk 1995) for viewers to master. As Buckland

writes,

These rules, which are reliable in that they are systematic and unambiguous (. . .)

constitute the video game’s environment, or location, which is not restrained by the

laws of the physical world. The game user can experience video pleasure primarily by

attempting to master these rules – that is, decipher the game’s logic. Moreover, the

desire to attain mastery makes video games addictive, which at times can lead to the

user’s total absorption into the game’s rules and environment. (Buckland 2014c: 187)

This perspective also highlights how the (initial) inability to master these rules (or in film, the

confusion we may feel as spectators) is an integral and essential part of the experience. After

all, as video game theorist Jesper Juul points in his book The Art of Failure (2013), feelings of

inadequacy are a key part of gameplay, since a game in which we never fail is unlikely to

offer much enjoyment or gratification. Something similar could be said of today’s popular

complex film narratives: comparable to how a video game ‘promises us that we can remedy

the problem if we keep playing’ (Juul 2013.: 7), the attraction of these films may lie in that

they similarly trigger us to overcome the ‘inadequacy that they produce in us in the first

place’ (ibid.: 7) by allowing us to gradually master the rules of the game and gratify our sense

of competence.

In sum, multiple perspectives can be further explored regarding the interrelation between

narrative complexity and today’s broader audio-visual culture. At the same time, given the

complex network of cultural, technological, economic, social, and psychological factors

involved, it remains difficult to separate causation and contingency from coincidence or

simple simultaneity. The above factors form some suggestions of what appear to be relevant

influences that warrant further exploration, but I will leave it to others more specialised in

these fields to determine whether the technological and economical shifts reflected (Everett

2005), encouraged (Johnson 2006), were answered by (Buckland 2014b), extended in

(Cameron 2008), feedbacked (Hayles and Gessler 2004), set the stage for, impacted or simply

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coincided with (Mittell 2015) changing modes of narration.

5.3 Narrative complexity and ideology?

For some scholars, answering the question of why puzzle films resonate with audiences today

will involve uncovering what these films say about us – i.e., how they express of reflect our

times, our minds, our cultural obsessions, or societal structures, our collective fears and

desires, and so forth. Such analyses are generally the territory of cultural studies, the various

fields of the humanities that theoretically engage in the analysis of cultural practices in

connection to their socio-cultural (e.g., political, social, historical) backgrounds. Cultural

studies’ readings of artworks often target societal constructs and power structures that shape,

underlie, or are negotiated in cultural practices and expressions (such as ideology, class,

gender, or cultural identity).

This dissertation has not engaged with complex films’ implicit or explicit ideological or

socio-political concerns – an absence that may, for a study rooted in the humanities, appear

striking to some. This dissertation’s lack of engagement with these matters reflects a choice in

scope: I have sought to gain an understanding of the pathways by which spectators interpret

and engage with complex stories in film, rather than to practice interpretation in the ways

necessary to expose these narratives’ socio-cultural meanings or ideological underpinnings. I

am aware that to some branches of the humanities, not dealing with matters of ideology is

itself considered ideologically suspect (e.g., as equalling a naïve compliance with dominant

ideologies), and such assumptions have sometimes been voiced as objections to cognitive

approaches to the humanities in particular. As Carl Plantinga writes, some film scholars

‘assume that claims for human nature are politically dangerous, since they establish normative

behavior against which alternatives may be found to be perverse or inferior’ (Plantinga 2002:

29). Critics have used such arguments to criticise cognitive approaches for an apparent lack of

concern for cultural, social, or political issues, or for an alleged blind trust in notions of

‘science,’ ‘objectivity’ or ‘universality.’ Yet, as Plantinga also highlights, focusing on the

cognition of viewers need not contradict, exclude, marginalise aspects of ‘difference’,

whether socio-cultural, political, or gendered. Nor is cognitivism’s appropriation of concepts

from the sciences in itself reductive or naïve (although some precaution is certainly legitimate

in these matters). A well-executed cognitive approach will select its theories and methods on a

rationally founded basis, arguing for its significance (and limits) with regards to the answers

and knowledge it seeks to pursue. As far as this process is reliant on adopting theories from

other disciplines or neighbouring fields, this importing of models and theories is usually of a

heuristic nature, and does not (necessarily) imply any blind faith in a higher authority of

science (at least not more than in the way in which cultural studies scholars appropriate and

re-utilise theoretical frameworks from, for instance, Lacanian psychoanalysis or Marxist

critical theory). I do not subscribe to the idea that because the humanities’ object of study is

culture, all its research must necessarily be ideologically loaded; rather, in my view, cultural

studies and cognitive approaches can co-exist as two potent and complementary tools for the

humanities in studying the ways in which culture and the arts shape our experience of the

world and vice versa.

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Without entering the broader disciplinary discussion, I hope that the absence of ideology as an

explicit concern in this study will not be held against it. More importantly, I would suggest

that a cultural studies approach to complex film narratives would offer an interesting

alternative take on to the topic – one that, to my knowledge, still remains relatively

unexplored. Does complexity in narratives function as a site or tool for ideological critique?

Does the popularity of such stories today expose underlying cultural or ideological patterns?

And is the popularity of these films primarily a ‘first world’ phenomenon, or can they also

function as a vehicle of expression for marginalised groups or conflicts? It seems to me that

one of the most striking things about complex narrative forms in cinema lies the diversity of

the set of films in which they have occurred. One the one hand, some films have used

complex storytelling in ways that indeed invite readings of their formal play as ideological

resistance – from the cinematic modernism that emerged in post-war Europe, to the radical

Marxism of Jean-Luc Godard and the early Bernardo Bertolucci, to more recent uses of

comparable technique of narrative defamiliarisation in various national cinemas (cf. Abbas

Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, or Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux). At the same time,

there are also many more commercially oriented examples that seem unconcerned with

matters of ideology (think of blockbusters like Inception, or Edge of Tomorrow), but which

may still be implicitly imbued or complaint with dominant ideological patterns. A future

research program could be aimed at unravelling the manifold cultural and ideological

intersections of the ways in which different cinemas have adopted complex narrative

techniques, or the ways in which complex narratives in film can reflect aspects of our various

social, economic, or political climates.

5.4 Narrative complexity and affect?

Another connection that seems to warrant detailed exploration is that between complex film

narratives and matters of emotion. In this dissertation, we have touched on some of the ways

in which narrative complexity and affect seem to intersect. I discussed the role of affective

qualities (such as our identification or empathy with characters, and our emotional

involvement in their actions and goals) in stimulating our engagement with a story’s more

cerebrally puzzling elements; or, conversely, the way in which the ‘cognitively

overwhelming’ effects of a highly complex narrative may evoke or create room for certain

affective responses in viewers. These observations are however only the tip of the iceberg.

We can arguably detect connections between complexity and affect in many of our viewing

experiences. When watching David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive for instance, the unsettling

music and sound design, evoked feelings of horror and suspense, and our visceral responses to

the film’s grotesque imagery can all be equally contributive to the complexity of the overall

viewing experience as the confusion exerted strictly by its narrative makeup. In Ingmar

Bergman’s Persona, the formal-structural play seems to facilitate an intellectual, but also very

affective game of empathy and identification (for the characters as well as the viewer). And

even in more mainstream cinematic puzzles like Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival or Christopher

Nolan’s Inception, our engagement with the films’ spatio-temporal paradoxes does not only

concern their logical or cosmic implications, but ultimately focuses on the dramatic ways in

which these storyworld laws affect the protagonists in their personal and emotional choices

about their family lives – choices that we as viewers may relate to.

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In short, in our experiences of complexity in narrative, matters of cognition and emotion often

appear inseparable. But although the acknowledgement of this interrelation is easy, it also

continues to pose theoretical and conceptual difficulties. This is not least due to the elusive

nature of affective responses in general – both in terms of their strong individual variability,

as well as in the diverse and sometimes elusive roles that affective responses may play in

cognition (even pre-, sub- or non-consciously). These questions readily entail larger general

issues on how cognition is informed by emotion, and vice versa – matters that remain at the

heart of debates in cognitive psychology, neuroscience and philosophy of mind (where,

generally speaking, many recent arguments too have been increasingly critical of traditional

Cartesian conceptual dichotomies like emotion and reason, or mind and body – e.g., Varela,

Rosch & Thompson 1991; Damasio 2006; Thompson 2010).

In the study of film, separating ‘cognitive’ from ‘affective’ effects often forms a helpful

conceptual and heuristic tool to formulate specific research questions about how films work

on spectators. Focusing on one of the two, however, often entails the risk of overlooking or

downplaying the role of the other. This has been a prominent critique against cognitivism –

particularly its original, ‘first generation’ incarnations, which tended to treat the mind in terms

of computational processes dealing in abstractions and representations. Emotions could be

approached in terms of intentional states, such as judgements and appraisals, but integrating

the role of felt bodily states into models of cognition proved more problematic. Cognitive film

theory increasingly acknowledged and addressed the roles of affect and empathy from the

mid-1990s onwards (e.g., Smith 1995; Tan 1996; Grodal 1997; or Plantinga and Smith 1999),

but approaches to film narration often remained rooted in fairly ‘cognitivist’ models (e.g.,

Bordwell 1985; Branigan 1992). According to film theorist Steffen Hven (2017), one result of

this is that some of the work on cinematic narrative complexity today still falls prey to what

he calls a ‘cognitive reductionism’:

In this cognitive reductionism, the spectator’s affective experience of the narrative is

assumed to be of no relevance to the question of narrative complexity. Affect is simply

the result of a lack of information that temporarily blocks the emergence of a complete

representation of the narrative. According to this view, the apparent complexity of the

syuzhet exercizes little, if any, influence on the complexity of the fabula, since from

the analytical perspective, this is predestined to transform into a causal-linear series of

events. Consequently, according to this approach, ‘linearization’ is perceived to be the

condition of narrative comprehension as such, rather than an analytical tool or a mode

of organizing experience (Hven 2017: 145)

Hven pleas for the recognition of the bodily and affective effects of complex film narratives,

and seeks to challenge the thinking about narrative complexity in terms of the cognitive

restoration of order and linearity. For Hven, complex films ‘force us to think about the

interrelation of what has traditionally been kept isolated, such as the linear and non-linear; the

affective, emotional, and cognitive investment of the audiences; the contingent from the

causally determined; the body from the mind; etc.’ (Hven 2017: 14). He also argues that

moving towards more embodied, direct and enactivist approaches will require the

reconceptualisation of many of film studies’ traditional analytical and narratological concepts.

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To these ends, his work proposes a blend of ideas from cognitive sciences, complexity theory,

neuroscience, and Deleuzian film-philosophy (ibid.: 9).

Whereas my approach has sought to understand the cognitive and interpretive aspects of our

engagement with complex narratives, Hven seeks to understand how complex narratives work

in terms of altering sensations6 – or what he calls the ‘embodied fabula.’ Although Hven’s

critique of the overly ‘cognitivist’, ‘disembodied’ or ‘representationalist’ nature of film

narratology touches on some vital points for future theorising, it is equally important that we

do not throw out the baby with the bath water by readily discarding or wholly inverting all

cognitive models in order to prioritise embodied and affective impacts. Rather, the challenge

for future research will lie in integrating both perspectives (the cognitive-interpretive as well

as the embodied-affective) into more unified models, to conceptualise the relations between

them, and to explore the ways in which narrative cues, interpretation, perceptual affordances,

emotional arousal, and bodily experiences co-shape experiences of complexity. The

theoretical underpinnings of the ‘second-generation’ cognitive sciences seem more suited to

doing so than earlier cognitive approaches to the arts, and as such, these approaches may in

the future offer more refined tools and vocabularies to think about the interrelatedness of

perception, emotion, cognition, action, embodiment, and environment.

5.5 Medium specificity in eliciting complexity?

Lastly, another question that seems to warrant deeper exploration, and that is also closely

related to the affective impact of complex films, pertains to the specificity of the cinematic

medium in offering experiences of complexity. In other words, is narrative complexity in film

qualitatively different from complicated storytelling in other narrative media, such as

literature?

On the one hand, many of this dissertation’s claims about the cognitive and

interpretive dynamics of complexity could theoretically also hold for other forms of narrative

art. This is in part a consequence of the chosen approach: cognitive narratology tends to

emphasise a ‘medium-independent’ view, focusing on narrative in terms of the mental

structure that results from mediated experiences, rather than on medial representation itself.

On the other hand, however, it is also reasonable to assume that complicating storytelling

techniques like metalepses, temporal disruptions, or logical impossibilities exert different

effects across different media, at least on a phenomenological level. Deeper investigation of

these possible qualitative differences could support a more comparative perspective on

different media’s affordances for narrative complexity. Furthermore, such work might also

shed new light on the question of why narrative complexity has gained such relatively

widespread popularity in audio-visual media like film and television in particular. In literature

6 An illustration of this idea is offered in Miklós Kiss’s (2010) discussion of the famous ‘escape’ sequence from

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 Pierrot Le Fou – a scene that presents its narrative events radically out of order. Kiss

argues that the point of this scene is not that spectators (chrono)logically re-order the pieces; rather, he finds that

the scene’s non-linearity has a ‘realistic’ effect that works ‘viscerally’ rather than on an ‘inferential’ level (2010:

171-2), expressively re-creating the characters’ sense of panic and sudden distress. According to Kiss, Godard

may indeed undermine the realism of classical film style, but the director substitutes this for another, more

cognitive-affective realism in which the most important effect is not ‘to understand what is represented, but what

matters is the alteration of sensation’ (ibid. 171).

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for instance, similar confusing or paradoxical forms of narration can be found throughout 20th

century fiction, yet their impact seems to have primarily consisted of the acclaim from a more

intellectualist audience – from early literary modernism’s attempt to express subjectivity or

epistemological relativity in narrative form, through the self-reflexivity of ‘high modernist’

and ‘nouveaux romans’ such as Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (1951), Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La

Jalousie (Jealousy, 1957), or Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963), all the way to the

loops, fragmentations, and enigmas that pervade postmodern literature (cf. the expansive

enigmas of Thomas Pynchon, or Italo Calvino’s intricately intertwined fiction and meta-

fiction). Although the cultural impact of these works is undeniable, their experiments with

narrative form do not seem to have spread into popular novels the way they have in

contemporary film and television (although more substantial research on the formal-narrative

experimentations in contemporary popular literature might disprove this hunch). Part of this

may have to do with the different roles, contexts and audiences of both media in our cultures;

however, medium-specific affordances could play a role as well. It is not unlikely that

constructing complexity in a verbal, symbolical medium like literature offers a different kind

of stimulation than in audio-visual media, where part of the appeal of such narratives might

lie in cinema’s ability to make such paradoxical, impossible or enigmatic worlds perceptually

available (rather than a purely intellectual puzzle). Cinema’s more ‘direct’ embodied

simulation, as well as its alluring effect of ‘seeing is believing’, may enhance the possibility

for spectators to immerse themselves in ‘impossible possible worlds’, which could make film

particularly suited to the fictional experience of, in Marie-Laure Ryan’s words, ‘making

oneself at home on a Moebius strip’ (2013: 142).

At the same time, the emphasis in this study on contemporary audio-visual culture

should also not eclipse the fact that complex forms of narration can be found throughout the

history of modern culture and the arts. Regardless of popularity, there has been a consistent

thread of experimentation with storytelling and its boundaries throughout 20th

and 21st century

literature, film and theatre alike.7 Moreover, reflections on the aesthetic fascination with

complexity can already be found in the work of some innovative 20th

century authors. In

conclusion to this thesis, I would like to turn briefly to one illustrative case that reflects and

reflects on this artistic drive to use complexity as a means to challenge narrative conventions,

expand the expressive arsenal of stories, or to reap the strange or perplexing effects such

fiction may produce – a case, moreover, that even though it stems from a very different

medial and historical context than today’s complex films, is interestingly also not all too

dissimilar from them. A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain (Examen de la obra de Herbert

Quain) is a 1941 short story by Jorge Luis Borges, disguised as a piece of faux literary

criticism. Borges’s short stories are often discussed and praised for their fantastical,

philosophical, and meta-fictional qualities; yet what they frequently also display and

thematise is the sheer fascination that we may take in complexity itself, and the intellectual

and sensational pleasures it can provide. A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain presents a

7 A historical connection of course also exists between mid-20

th century experimental literature and some

pioneering cases of complex storytelling in the art cinema, with several influential art films adapting source

material from experimental and modernist authors (e.g., Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, based on Julio

Cortázar’s short story of the same name) or even directly involving these authors as screenplay writers (e.g., the

co-operation between Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet on L’Année Dernière à Marienbad).

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eulogy commemorating the work of a recently deceased, somewhat obscure, yet entirely

fictional Irish author Herbert Quain. Borges discusses several of the author’s works, noting

how they are remarkable in their attempts at astonishing the reader through formal

experimentation. For example, in one of the discussed ‘novels’, a detective story, titled The

God of the Labyrinth, the reader can discover that the detective’s ultimate solution to the

murder is in fact erroneous, and has to revisit previous chapters to discover an alternative,

correct solution to the story. Another, titled April March, is described by Borges as a work of

‘regressive, ramifying fiction’ (Borges 2002: 61) consisting of a collection of forking-path

stories in reverse: the reader starts with a single scene, to which nine alternative paths can be

read as leading up to it – all forming different stories, and all placing their same final,

inherently ambiguous, scene in a different light. And then there is The Secret Mirror, a play in

two acts. The first, longer act supposedly presents the reader with a rather conventional

drama, set in a general’s country home, and revolving around the general’s daughter, a duke

to whom she is engaged, and a playwright who admires and courts her. This first act is riddled

with small but strange dissonances. In the second, shorter act, the same characters re-appear,

in a parallel plot, but under different names: the playwright is a traveling salesman, and is the

author of the first act; the large country house is now the rooming house where he is staying,

and the lady whom he admires is indeed of nobility, but only known to him through pictures

that he cuts out of magazine articles.

It is not hard to find in ‘Quain’s’ stories reflections of some of Borges’s own literary

obsessions. Like Borges’s stories, Quain’s fictions do not only present the world itself as a

labyrinth, but also seek to expand the limits of narrative form – through fractured and

radically non-linear structures, by highlighting the mutable nature of meaning, or by opening

up metaleptic connections between layers of fictions and realities. Yet, although for Borges

they may have primarily been fantastical literary thought experiments, for a modern reader

like myself, the stories of Herbert Quain appear to have acquired an almost prophetic quality.

Borges’s imaginary novels appear to prefigure much of the narrative play actually found in

midcult and mainstream cinema today. It is now acceptable for a film like Memento to expect

that its viewers, like the reader of The God of the Labyrinth, are more perceptive than the

story’s detective, question the presented outcome, and puzzle the pieces together

independently. Likewise, plenty of films in the last decades have explored the possibilities of

branching or alternating forking-paths (from Run Lola Run to Mr. Nobody) or have used a

retrogressive presentation of events to shed a different light on their final or first scenes (e.g.,

Irréversible or, again, Memento). And the radical two-act structure that Borges devised for

The Secret Mirror, with a second act re-framing the first as a fiction within the fiction, and

exposing its events as fantasised renditions of a more grim and mundane reality, could have

been a blueprint for the structure of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. These films do not

only resemble Quain’s stories in that they playfully explore the boundaries and mimetic

potential of narratives, but also in that they too make us, spectators, reflect on the processes

by which we are implicated in their stories. By tempting us into trying to discover the

narrative’s coherence, order, and meaning, what these films ultimately foreground – just like

Quain’s stories – is our role in determining, conjuring up, and altering these meanings, indeed

ultimately revealing us, the viewers, as the true ‘gods of the labyrinth.’

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